G3explorer and MARVIN Mode

With the G3Explorer

you can unpack the .pak and .p00 files of Gothic:

http://tesoblivion.de/Downloads/Goth…/G3Explorer.7z

Always unpack the .pak file first, the the patch file .p00

Example:
1) unpack
c:\program files\gothic iii\data\_compiledImage.pak
into the directory
c:\program files\gothic iii\data\_compiledImage

2) unpack
c:\program files\gothic iii\data\_compiledImage.p00
into the directory
c:\program files\gothic iii\data\_compiledImage

3) rename _compiledImage.p00 and _compiledImage.pak

4) Set TestMode=true in ge3.ini

5) Start Gothic 3

6) Open the console via ^

7) view your memory stats with ctrl-S
______

If you unpack sound.pak and sound.p00 you can listen to all sounds.
Load an ogg-vorbis media player codec first. This one for example:
http://www.illiminable.com/ogg/

These sounds are much nicer than the ingame sounds for many players, because of the "ambient sound bug", that is still not fixed by PB.

Thanks very much, been wantng to unpack my files for awhile.

Many times I have experenced better performance with unoptimised games, i.e. Bloodlines.
While I am not sure exactly how much it oftens seems as you can pick up maybe 5% to 10% performance increase due to not needing to uncompress/compress textures and such everytime you need them.

Performance gain with unpacking -
it depends on your cpu-power and/or harddrive performance and the defragmentation of your drive.

Yes, the humble harddrive -

I have a matched pair which are raided into one via the motherboard. Then in win-xp i make two equal partitions losing 8mb data segment to each. After installing windows-xp on one virtual drive - i dynamic disk them both, then i "virtual-raid" them back into one (striped) this gives my humble HDD sytem a whopping 27% proven and measured overall performance gain.

…ahh, the humble harddrive! (sorry to digress a little)

Uh…. for the technically challenged like myself, who has no idea what packing and unpacking means (unless we're talking about .zip files)…will I benefit by unpacking this stuff, or would I need some special hard drive?

Pentium Dual Core
2 GB Ram
Plain ole ordinary humble hard drive @ 7200 RPM

Oh.. and my PC is brand new and VERY "defragged". I'm like a compulsive degragger.

Originally Posted by Jabberwocky
Uh…. for the technically challenged like myself, who has no idea what packing and unpacking means (unless we're talking about .zip files)…will I benefit by unpacking this stuff, or would I need some special hard drive?

Well, to say it simple, we are pretty much talking about ZIP files here. There are many packing programs which work just like ZIP, such as RAR, ACE, gz, 7z etc.

PAK and p00 here is basicly just like huge zip files, you just need another program to open them (winzip wont work). Game developers "pack" all files the game need into huge "zip" files to save harddrive space as well as keeping the installation folder "clean". When the game is running, the game read and unpack files from within the "zip" file into your memory.

So how much hard disk space are we talking? I've got about 184 GB free.
Thanks!

Well an easy rule of thumb on this is to expect to double the size of you current game, since you will be unpacking the largest files in the game.
In Bloodlines I deleted the pak files after I had it all working, but I suggest you not do that if you have the room and this is your first time.
Always have a folder of your important personal files, like your G3.ini, Useroptions.in and your Save games for example, keeping it somewhere other than your G3 game directory.
If you want to get fancy you can make a folder ofr orginal files and modded, so you can quickly revert back to a working iini file if a tweak didn't work out.

I just unpacked every large file in the game. I have about 100gb free on my game partition. Hope it works.
I believe you might have to unpack more when there's a new patch.

Nah, well at least usually Patches directly effect files in the pak files, I have never seen a Patch Not work due to files being unpacked.
While I am not a dev, its my bet they do Not have pak files in their games, nor CP fpr that matter.
Every engine I can recall, this includes past Gothic's looks for the files First in the normal [Non pak file] directory file struckture, then it looks in the pak files, which is another reason its faster without pak files.

This isn't hard or dangerous to test, just move the pak files out of the G3 directory, many times people don't notice a difference and maybe thats true.
Would most people realise that if a game is running from 10fps to 20fps a 5% to 10% increase?
It's hard to notice unless you try to notice and know what to look for.
I don't mean its to compllex or anything its just most don't take that close of mesurement to start with and getting 1 fps or 2 fps is Not noticable to most peeps.
The thing is for someone that is trying many different approches getting 5% to 10% on 4 or 5 things is what matters.

Originally Posted by HiddenX
These sounds are much nicer than the ingame sounds for many players, because of the "ambient sound bug", that is still not fixed by PB.

This has also very much bothered me ever since I've had the game. The game is currently simply too quiet. It's weird standing in front of a massive waterfall that is completely silent.

Well I've noticed with the ambient sound bug that sounds seem to generate themselves very rapidly and repetitively, making it too difficult for sound card to play all the various sounds, so it cuts out half a second after it starts.